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C. Elliot Ritter
VCL Forum, et al: ciaran_skye
Yahoo: panton41
AOL: Panton91
Google Talk: panton41
MSN: panton41@hotmail.com
e-mail: Panton41@gmail.com
Web Site (beware of broken links): http://panton41.home.insightbb.com/
Personal Blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ciaran_skye/
Writing Blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/c-elliot-ritter
Hometown: Jeffersonville, Ind. (Near Louisville, Ky.)
Current Home: Jeffersonville, Ind.
Date of Birth: Oct. 27, 1978
Height/Weight: 5 feet 11 inches, 200-210 pounds
Pets: Sadie (black domestic longhair cat)
Occupation: Driver for Pizza Hut in New Albany, Ind.
School: Currently working on my BA in journalism at Indiana University Southeast with a minor in Computer Science
Car: A maroon 1992 Nissan Sentra SE named Vicky.
Favorite Animal: Red Fox (especially Common Red phase)
Favorite Author and Book: Neil Gaiman American Gods
Favorite Singer, Song and Album: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, “Night Moves” (from Night Moves), Live Bullet(1976)
Favorite Poet and Poem: William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child”
Favorite Furry Type: Vixens, of course.
My “Furry” Story — now with details on the origins of my furry stories!
Like most “Furries” I’ve been into anthropomorphic animals since an early age. I remember admiring Mrs. Brisby from The Secret of NIMH. In middle school I read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and I reread Roscoe and the Rats of NIMH so many times that the school librarian said I couldn’t check it out again. Middle school was also when Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers came out and it resulted in a crush on Gadget. This lead to a fascination with rodents for a couple years, but eventually died away. In my 8th grade year I had a bizarre dream about Star Trek: The Next Generation and a woman with the head of a purple Lisa Frank cat. This dream fascinated me mainly because of the Star Trek element, but the character, who I named “Deborah Moore” was longer lasting.
When I was in high school Animanics, Tiny Toons, and Batman: The Animated Series were in a block of cartoon after school and I found myself looking forward to seeing Minerva Mink more than Hello Nurse. I began thinking not-so-nice thoughts about the Tiny Toon women and the one-shot character Julie Bruin with bouncy DD’s was very nice. There was also one particular episode of Batman where Catwoman turned into a cat-woman, which instantly became my favorite. All in all, I never mentioned this to my friends and was always embarrassed when my friend Sam would bring up that crush on Gadget.
In high school I wrote a short action story involving Deborah as the companion of a human name Greg who were soldiers walking across a Martian plain. From there she was moved around into a cyberpunk story and then back to Mars by end of my freshman year.
Around 1999 I was doing some searches looking for stuff on The Secret of NIMH and found a fantastic fan site from an artist named Ken Singshow which had links off of it to his other stuff … which I ignored and only looked at the Secret of NIMH stuff.
Finally in December 2001 I was rewriting the story with Deborah and I was looking for a reference picture for her, mentally. I did several searches using Google Image Search, trying not to get pictures of the anime cat-girls who look like humans with ears and a tail or the Batman villainess/heroine. Finally after several searches finding nothing within a few pages into the search I found some combination and found the perfect picture, though it as a bit toony. The best I can remember it as the Yerf artist Candy Palmer’s fursonna on Yerf. From there I went to the Yerf root level and began searching and found all sorts more. Of course I followed link off of it and did more Google searches and found all sorts of website. (One of these days I’m going to open all of my saved bookmarks again and do some housecleaning, I haven’t opened some in years.)
Around January 2001 I started reading a completely non-Furry book titled Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. It was an amazing book and I recommend it, but like a good author I wanted to assimilate the ideas into my own work. The result of that I can’t fully remember and I thank the gods I never wrote it down. It was dreck. When I did sit down to type I invented a vixen character named Victoria who was a Genalt, or Genetically altered (today I use Gemos based off of the actual term Genetically Modified Organism or GMO, though it’s an insulting tot them) who was beaten down by punks and then rescued by an older human character of mine named Jazmine Detrix. (Currently I’m basing a completely non-Furry story off of that one and Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.)
It’s worth noting that very rarely I have a Furry as the protagonist, for a reason: I don’t identify with them. The way I write I have to be able to ground myself in a character and identify with him or her. I can’t do it with a Furry, I have no desire to either. People might want to read my “Fur and Loathing” series to understand my point of view on this more.
Within a few months I began hopping around for idea and settled on developing one involving an old soldier character of mine named Brian Unis. In this version he was a U.S. Marine Corp Sniper/Scout who magically went from the hills of Tora Bora in Afghanistan to a forest and meets a huntress vixen. It had the feel of Carol Curtis’s comic Katmandu, the RPG Ironclaw and a generic medieval with the vixen having some of the personality of the character Hunter from Neverwhere. setting I tried putting that story to disk once and failed after about only a page or so. Nothing sounded right. I remember working on that story idea at Boy Scout summer camp (I’m an assistant scoutmaster with the troop I was in s a Scout) in July 2003 I think and I most likely started on the new version of it later that summer.
That new version I decided to change a lot of things very quickly. Within the first page I had changed Brian from being a Marine to a doctor — since I was scheduled to start nursing school at the time. The vixen went from an adventurer to a simple kitchen girl named Suzzann (after the singer Suzanne Vega who I was listening to when I wrote the first chapter) — who was just to the left of being a total whore. She was being abused by a Procid head chef named Scancy. There was a father-figured Ursid named Brutania. A Felid who I imaged as being equal parts Fritz the Cat and Nick Tortelli on Cheers. An ermine Mustilid named Father Simm (which was originally looking for an animal that had bit of a quality that might fit the role — ermine fur is often used for royalty — later as a religious statement i.e. Priests and other clergymen are weasels. And finally and most important, from his point of view at least was a Leonid named Duke Mikael Andago. (I chose a duke because suddenly finding an audience with the king as soon as you get there is a cliché.)
The first almost 10,000 words (at least of the finished text on my hard drive, it was probably much less when I did) were written over the course of only about a week on a Canon Starwriter 300 stand-alone word processor over late nights in more or less a single manic tear. Finally things happened in my family life and I ended up leaving home for while and also ended up with my computer to write on rather than only as a gaming machine. (I consider writing time very personal and the computer was a family one for a while.) I was finally able to get them off of the ASCII floppy disks and into MS Word.
At the time I had mixed up VCL’s entry rules with FurryMUCK or something similar and I thought I needed a non-anonymous email address (that is one like from your ISP, work or in my case school) to be able to apply. I applied with my artwork, which was declined so I turned to the stories on my computer. They were approved (which now as the writing assessor I realize nearly any person who can write a coherent English fictional sentence about Furries can get in) and I began refining the story which I had titled “Terrae” after a Latin word for “earth”.
The first thing I did was to add more to it. By the end of that version of the story I had over 14,000 words which actually came as quite a shock to me recently looking back at them. I expanded the story and got to a point five “chapters” in that I couldn’t write this anymore. It was just kind of a dead end. So I removed maybe 9,000 words — back to the second “chapter” of it and began again. That too, another 13,000 words in (to my current record of 18,000 words of writing on a single story) began to fall apart with each revision of the early story. I started working on what would be the definitive version of Chapter 1 (as in I deleted or overwrote the old files) and stopped.
I took a step back and looked at it. The whole damn thing. In the terms used my computer programmers it as getting a lot of “code bloat”. A lot was there that shouldn’t have been (like words from my freakishly huge vocabulary and medical terminology) and I didn’t go into some characterization that I should have with the not-so-newly re-named and later re-named again Susanne Bordé-Andago. (It’s worth noting that I still like that name and if the story were still using some of the earlier setting elements I’d still use it — I see it as her “maiden name” in my storytelling progress.) Finally I just didn’t like where it was going. I had planned ahead, but I didn’t like where it was going.
Over the course of several months I wrote very little on it. I would write stuff from inside of it, but not at the beginning or end. I also began exploring other stories. I had written story unrelated to the main one titled “We’ve Got Tonight” (after Bob Seger), but as originally, “Yesterday” (after The Beatles) and conceived as “Jipsee, Tramps and Thieves” (after the Cher song I caught the ending of that started the entire train of thought). I also worked on a story about Susanne losing her virginity and meeting and then losing her mother that I thought had potential and is now an odd footnote since the setting and Susanne has changed too much since then. (I was also trying to write it without using any version of the verb “be” in a style called e-prime which is a very hard thing to do, but makes for very active — rather than passive — writing.)
I based an unfinished story off of a concept of a Furry “dog fox” meeting a Furry vixen raised in the wild. Similar in retrospect to the web comic Faux Pas but I hadn’t made the connect until just as I wrote this. It’s still in a setting where humans exist. Some have a purely sexual attraction to Furries, but less like “Furries” and more like how some people really want to bang someone of a certain race. I called them “fur coaters” and the Furries involved in it “fur coats” both used in a causally derogatory way — like calling someone a “fuck buddy” or having “jungle fever”. That was a dead end that died quietly but I think it had real potential.
Another unfinished story that I still really like and I’m impressed I could even pull it off (and I doubt I could get in the mindset again to finish) was a story about a vixen running away from a cult-like farm run by Father and His Children were all Anthros. (In the story the proper term would have been “Genalts” or “Zooforms”.) “Father” is how I see a lot of very extreme “Furries” going if real ones suddenly existed. The story got its base from a book called Fay by Larry Brown and Father was very loosely based on Fay’s father who was a sociopath. I think this story had more potential than the previous one.
Actually Fay as responsible for much of the Terrae story’s character development. Brian is basically the character from that story named Sam Harris, lifted into the setting with more than a few major changes. Much of Susanne’s behavior came from Fay herself. Fay was very badly abused and so was Susanne.
Slowly though a story progressed into my head and one day I sat down and started writing on it. It eventually panned out into a decent story that, besides a really silly bit about Brian having a crush on Susanne, was going fine. But I stopped about 9,00 words in due to writer’s block. When I started writing again the story came out completely differently than before. I was in a Creative Writing class and the professor was talking about stream of consciousness so I used it. That story didn’t even live past a single chapter.
So I took a story about Furry murders to The Vault a science fiction writing club in Louisville, Ky and got what I’ve later her them describe as “yeah you’re doing fine” which is basically, “yeah, its crap”. I mentioned to one of them that I’ve rewritten a story for the fourth time and she said to stop since I was too close to the story so I did.
I focused on a story about ritually murdered vixen who were hunted and killed. It took a complete rewrite the next time and I got the picture after that one not to write Furry stuff for that club and — in fact the next month the told me not to bring it anymore. By that time I had moved onto fairies, which is my current obsession, which I won’t go into here since it’s off topic.
Working on non-Furry stories doesn’t mean that I wasn’t developing the Terrae one. I was dramatically and for the better (in my opinion). One night while I work I decided to have Susanne have had and lost a daughter. Another day at work resulted in Brian not meeting her until quite a while into the story. (And I can remember exactly where I was when I figured those out.)
So where are they now? Where’s the story going? Where are all the stories going? I try to keep my writing blog up to date on the latest developments on it. My focus recently has been moving away from the Terrae story by itself since I’ve integrated it into the fairy one and now background development for Brian also covers the main character in that one too and vice versa. Susanne has been taken into the story to a lesser role, but with very little crossover besides being a small woman, young or at least young looking and abused.
I regularly write new segments to the Terrae story, just not in the order they happen. Most likely what’s up on VCL now (and I’m including in the future) is out of date to the current sorry and is in need to heavy revision. From time to time I may write a new Furry story, but most of my attention is now focused on non-Furry stuff.